The Origin and Development of Language
Human language may have emerged by the transition to behavioral modernity, which occurred some 50,000 years ago at the latest, in the Upper Paleolithic Era. A common assumption is that behavioral modernity and the emergence of language coincide and are dependent on each other. Others would push back the origin of language to some 200,000 years ago, the time of the appearance of archaic Homo sapiens (Middle Paleolithic), or even into the Lower Paleolithic, to some 500,000 years ago. This question significantly depends on the view taken of the communicative skills of Homo neanderthalensis. A lengthy stage of pre-language, intermediate between the vocalizations of non-human primates and fully developed human language, is assumed by some scholars, while others (e.g. Richard Klein) view the acquisition of language and behavioral modernity as sudden, possibly linked to a genetic mutation (for an overview see Kenneally 2007). Chinese characters are used to record the Chinese language. Since the discovery of inscriptions on bones or tortoise shells of the Shang Dynasty (c. 16th-11th century BC), the Chinese language has a history of about 6, 000 years. Most of the 55 ethnic groups in China have their own languages, and 30 of them have their own written languages.
As the most widely spoken language on earth, Chinese is, strictly speaking, a series of dialects spoken by the dominant ethnic group within China, the Han. Indeed, the term most commonly used by the Chinese themselves to refer to the language is Hanyu, meaning "Han-language". 

 

Mandarin
Standard Mandarin, or Standard Chinese, is the official modern Chinese spoken language used in mainland China and Taiwan, and is one of the four official languages of Singapore. The phonology of Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, a large and diverse group of Chinese dialects spoken across northern and southwestern China. The vocabulary is largely drawn from this group of dialects. The grammar is standardized to the body of modern literary works written in Vernacular Chinese, which in practice follows the same tradition of the Mandarin dialects with some notable exceptions. As a result, Standard Mandarin itself is usually just called "Mandarin" in non- academic, everyday usage. However, linguists use "Mandarin" to refer to the entire language. This convention will be adopted by the rest of this article.
The Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) and the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) began to use the term Guanhua, or "official speech", to refer to the speech used at the courts. The term "Mandarin" comes directly from the Portuguese. The word "mandarin" was first used to name the Chinese bureaucratic officials (i.e., the mandarins), because the Portuguese, under the misapprehension that the Sanskrit word that was used throughout Asia to denote "an official" had some connection with the Portuguese word mandar (to order somebody to do something), and having observed that these officials all "issued orders", chose to call them mandarins. From this, the Portuguese immediately started calling the special language that these officials spoke amongst themselves (i.e., "Guanhua") "the language of the mandarins", "the mandarin language" or, simply, "Mandarin". The fact that Guanhua was, to a certain extent, an artificial language, based upon a set of conventions (that is, the various Mandarin dialects for grammar and meaning, and the specific dialect of the Imperial Court's locale for its pronunciation), is precisely what makes it such an appropriate term for Modern Standard Chinese (also the various Mandarin dialects for grammar and meaning, and their dialect of Beijing for its pronunciation). The People's Republic of China, established in 1949, continued the effort. In 1955, the name Guoyu was replaced by Putonghua, or "common speech". Since then, the standards used in mainland China and Taiwan have diverged somewhat, especially in newer vocabulary terms, and a little in pronunciation.
 
Dialects
Within China, it is common perception that these varieties are distinct in their spoken forms only, and that the language, when written, is common across the country. Therefore even though China is home to hundreds of relatively unique spoken languages, literate people are usually able to communicate through written language effectively.
 

Main dialects
Large differences exist between dialects. Dialects include Wu, Kan, Hsiang, Guangzhou (Cantonese), Min, and Hakka.
Wu Dialects: in the south of Jiangsu Province and the majority of Zhejiang Province;
Kan Dialects: mainly in Jiangxi Province;
Hsiang Dialects: in the majority of Hunan Province and north of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region;
Guangzhou Dialects (Cantonese): in the major part of Guangdong Province and southeast of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region;
Min Dialects: in Fujian, Taiwan and Hainan Provinces as well as Chaozhou and Shantou Cities of Guangdong Province;
Hakka Dialects: in Taiwan, east and north of Guangdong Province, west of Fujian Province as well as south of Jiangxi Province.

 

Cantonese
In the Qin Dynasty Chinese troops moved south and conquered the Baiyue territories, and thousands of Han people began settling in the Lingnan area. This migration led to the Chinese language being spoken in the Lingnan area. After Zhao Tuo was made the Duke of Nanyue by the Qin Dynasty and given authority over the Nanyue region, many Han people entered the area and lived together with the Nanyue population, consequently affecting the livelihood of the Nanyue people as well as stimulating the spread of the Chinese language. Although Han Chinese settlements and their influences soon dominated, some of the indigenous Nanyue population did not escape from the region. Today, the degree of interaction between Han Chinese and the indigenous population remains vague.
Cantonese is spoken in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, Macau, parts of Southeast Asia and by Overseas Chinese with an ancestry tracing back to the Guangdong region. Used by linguistics, "Cantonese" covers all the Yue dialects, such as Taishanese, though the term is also used to refer specifically to the Standard Cantonese of Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Similar to Wu and Min, not all subgroups of Cantonese are mutually intelligible. Some dialects of Yue have intricate sets of tone compared to other Chinese dialects, with up to seven or eight tones. Yue keeps a full complement of Middle Chinese word-final consonants.

Historically, the majority of the overseas Chinese have originated from just two provinces; Fujian and Guangdong. This has resulted in the overseas Chinese having a far higher proportion of Fujian and Guangdong dialect speakers than Chinese speakers in China as a whole. More recent emigration from Fujian and Hong Kong has continued this trend. The largest number of Cantonese speakers outside mainland China and Hong Kong are in South East Asia, however speakers of Min dialects are predominant among the overseas Chinese in South East Asia. The Cantonese spoken in Singapore and Malaysia is also known to have borrowed substantially from Malay and other languages.

 

Chinese Characters
According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie (c. 2650 BC), a bureaucrat under the legendary emperor, Huangdi. The legend tells that Cangjie was hunting on Mountain Yangxu (today Shanxi) when he saw a tortoise whose veins caught his curiosity. Inspired by the possibility of a logical relation of those veins, he studied the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth, and the stars in the sky, and invented a symbolic system called Zi — Chinese characters. It was said that on the day the characters were born, the Chinese heard the devil mourning, and saw crops falling like rain, as it marked the beginning of the world.
Seal script, which had evolved slowly in the state of Qín during the Eastern Zhou dynasty, became standardized and adopted as the formal script for all of China in the Qín dynasty (leading to a popular misconception that it was invented at that time), and was still widely used for decorative engraving and seals (name chops, or signets) in the Hàn dynasty onward. But despite the Qín script standardization, more than one script remained in use at the time. For example, a little-known, rectilinear and roughly executed kind of common (vulgar) writing had for centuries coexisted with the more formal seal script in the Qín state, and the popularity of this vulgar writing grew as the use of writing itself became more widespread. By the Warring States period, an immature form of clerical script called “early clerical” or“proto-clerical” had already developed in the state of Qín based upon thus vulgar writing, and with influence from seal script as well. The coexistence of the three scripts, small seal, vulgar and proto-clerical, with the latter evolving gradually in the Qín to early Hàn dynasties into clerical script, runs counter to the traditional beliefs that the Qín dynasty had one script only, and

that clerical script was suddenly invented in the early Hàn dynasty from the small seal script. The Chinese script spread to Korea together with Buddhism from the 7th century (Hanja). The Japanese Kanji were adopted for recording the Japanese language from the 8th century AD. The Vietnamese Han Tu were first used in Vietnam during the millennium of Chinese rule starting in 111 BC, while adaptation for the vernacular Chữ Nôm script (based on Chinese characters) emerged around the 13th century AD.
 
The Strokes of Chinese Characters
Chinese characters are written with twelve basic strokes.  If you want to learn about them, you can check with Google or other search engines on the Internet.